When Google first announced in early 2020 its plans to end support for third party cookies, it quickened a growing movement amongst brands to better understand their customers by strengthening their capabilities in first party data.
That led to a rush of investment in data management tools – most commonly in the form of customer data platforms (CDPs). The market for this toolset was estimated by Fortune Business Insights to be worth US$3.28 billion ($5.08 billion) in 2025.
While Google subsequently announced it was scrapping its deprecation plan in July 2024, few brands would consider their first party data investments wasted, with Fortune Business Insights confident that the CDP market would continue to see growth of greater than 20 percent until at least 2032.
This growth is driven by the desire of marketers to provide strong and personalised experiences, and that means getting to really know their prospective and current customers in every way they can.
Letting the data do the walking
With 18 brands spread across 850 stores and 36 websites, tracking customer data at the footwear and apparel retailer Accent Group provides a unique challenge for its centralised marketing team and its head of marketing technology Stuart Heggie.
For the past 18 months Heggie has been on a quest to modernise the company’s marketing stack and find efficiencies while delivering new data capabilities.
A key element of that work has been the implementation of the Amperity CDP, which is assisting with plans to allow individual brand owners within Accent Group to act with greater autonomy for their go-to-market strategies.
With so many brands in market, Heggie said it had been critical that Accent Group built a data stack that required minimal technical intervention.

One of the goals for the CDP is to help identify when the same customers were shopping across brands, or when a person in one household might be purchasing on behalf of another.
“We want to be able to identify lifetime spend for households, such as the ability to track families that purchase kids’ shoes right through to youth and then adult shoes,” Heggie said.
“So what contributed quite heavily to our choice of CDP was that the fuzzy logic and the ability have some control over the priority of certain attributes that we capture, to understand who they are.”
One of the side effects of this capability has been to increase Accent Group’s unique profile count.
“We were expecting it to go down, but it actually increased as we identified different traits,” Heggie said.
Accent Group has also been applying AI to its new data capabilities – at first for driving recommendations, but later for improving its understanding of lifetime value and calculating propensity models.
“The brand teams have been able to find those nuggets where they previously wouldn’t,” Heggie said.
“For Athlete’s Foot, we’ve got the ability to identify customers and the types of products they purchase, and then we’ve got modelling to predict the propensity for the category they’re likely to purchase next.”
Now he is looking at the opportunity to use large language models to help marketing teams build segments, using semantic tagging of data assets to pull segments together and then apply propensity modelling to quantify the potential value of that customer base.
“Our brands can then make a decision on whether it’s a cohort worth going after, or even suppressing,” Heggie said.
“The suppressing part is the almost equally as exciting, as obviously you don’t want to spend on marketing that we’re not going to get a purchase out of.”
While implementation of the CDP aligns with Accent Group’s longer-term plans to offer greater personalisation in its offers, Heggie said it was only scratching the surface of what was possible in terms of using that capability to optimise its conversion rates.
“We’re now at a point where we are able to start leveraging our enriched customer data through our CDP integrations, so we’re looking at leveraging really complex segmentation to deliver experiences,” Heggie said.
“We’ve got modelling to help nudge customers or provide real-time campaigns or real-time conversion uplifts like coupons to help them across the line.”
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